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In 2009, David L. Ulin, then book editor of the LA Times, wrote a column called “The Lost Art of Reading,” a piece I noted at the time. Ulin, still a book critic with the paper, was encouraged to expand the column into a longer essay, which was published late last year as The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, Ulin opens the book with some observations that (1) are rarely heard in literary circles, (2) I’ve held for a long time, and (3) explain why I have never been among the literary intelligentsia but, rather, an “illiterati.”
Ulin’s book starts with his 15-year-old son reading The Great Gatsby for a ninth grade humanities class. As we have all experienced, virtually any literature class pushes “finding the hidden nuance in literally every sentence.” Yet, Ulin observes:
Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece makes sense. Literature — at least the literature to which I respond — doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art.
Like Ulin, I began wondering early in my education how authors packed every sentence with and kept track of the subtleties, meaningful metaphors and allegorical allusions others found in simple phrases and descriptions. Plainly, all the novelists we read (or were forced to read) in literature classes were geniuses for whom even words like “the” or “and’ were stepping stones to a big, sometimes hidden, idea. Yet I would go further than Ulin. I think this need for “reckoning” everything persists outside the classroom and finds it way into many discussions or reviews of literature.
Maybe I’m a simpleton but isn’t it possible that sometimes an author is just telling a story? After all, we’ve all told ghost stories or tall tales that had no symbolism or meaning other than trying to scare or entertain. Of course, maybe the fact a book requires searching for symbolism and nuances is what differentiates “literature” or “literary” fiction from just plain novels. Here’s the thing, though. I read fiction for enjoyment and relaxation. I want to go to the places in the story. I want to love or hate the characters. I want to be part of their interactions. I want to become engrossed in their stories. I want their perspective of persons, places and events, whether ordinary or extraordinary. As Ian McEwan said in a recent interview, “The novel …is just an irreplaceable means of knowing what it’s like to be someone else.”
This isn’t to say I don’t grasp ideas or themes. Admittedly, maybe I miss some symbolism or meaning which, in turn, means I have a lesser understanding of the work or of what it’s like to be someone else. But I know that parsing sentences and paragraphs for that purpose disrupts my empathetic connection with a work. I want to be absorbed, almost oblivious to what’s around me. To me, reading is an exercise in emotion, not rationality or reasoning. Does viewing the cowardly lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as William Jennings Bryan really add to enjoyment of the tale itself? Anyone can see the representations of good and evil in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But, as Tolkien said, “To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs.”
So, that’s what makes me an “illiterati.” Whether for good or bad, it’s how I read and enjoy literature and the way I’ve done so for decades. Who knows? Perhaps it’s just that I’m too lazy or stupid to discover or read a subtle meaning or allegory in a particular character or language. Maybe it all hearkens back to rebelling against the strictures of classroom literary analysis. All I know is it is unlikely to change — and that it certainly doesn’t cheapen my love and enjoyment of reading. And when you get down to it, what’s important is that love, not its form or how it arises.
[Interpretation] is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
First-rate literature needs to succeed on more than one level. Regardless of the issues or themes a book may explore, they are irrelevant if the author doesn’t draw in and keep the reader with the story, characters or writing. Italian author Antonia Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, set in Portugal in the summer of 1938, succeeds on a variety of levels.
 Tabucchi addresses some serious issues, including the age-old question of whether we should be governed by reason or emotion and where our obligations lie in an authoritarian society. Yet Tabucchi’s title character, Dr. Pereira, is like most people, an ordinary person living an ordinary life. A respected crime reporter for 30 years who now edits the cultural page of a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, Pereira still mourns the death of his wife and struggles to follow the recommendations of his physician regarding his obesity and diet. These normal signposts in an individual’s life combine with life under the Estada Novo (“New State”), a conservative, nationalistic, pro-Catholic authoritarian regime, to cause the humble Pereira to face these issues.
What really drives Pereira Maintains. though, is a narrative device that gives rise to the title. An unknown third person narrates the story and, from the opening sentence, consistently uses the phrase “Pereira maintains” to relay what Pereira said. The phrase is used for both the significant and the mundane. Thus, the first chapter opens with “Pereira maintains he met him one summer’s day.” In contrast, the second chapter begins, “In the afternoon the weather changed, Pereira maintains.” The repeated usage of a phrase one would expect to see in a report on an interrogation or a formal inquiry combines with the fact we do not know who is reporting this contributes to and helps build an underlying sense of dread and disquiet. (Interestingly, when the book was first published in the U.S. in 1996 it carried the title Pereira Declares: A Testimony and it used “declares” instead of “maintains,” although it and this new hardcover release by a different publisher, Edinburgh-based Canongate Books, both use a translation by Patrick Creagh.)
The story is built around Pereira’s relationship with Monteiro Rossi, a recently a philosophy student, and Rossi’s girlfriend, Marta. Pereira, who talks to his wife’s picture every day, reads an excerpt from a dissertation Rossi wrote on death. He locates Rossi and invites him to write advance obituaries of living writers for the newspaper so they are available when the writer dies. Despite the fact none is worthy of publishing, Pereira seems drawn to Rossi and Marta, almost as if they were the children he and his wife never had. He continues to pay Rossi and invite him to write more. His growing relationship with Rossi and Marta and exposure to their left-wing ideas lead Pereira to examine if and how his life is changing and to become more cognizant of what he sees daily in the society in which he lives.
Since it was first published in Italy in 1994, Pereira Maintains has been seen as a commentary on Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, first named prime minister that year. In fact, Tabucchi himself has recognized that the book, which won three prestigious Italian literary awards, is seen by Berlusconi opponents as “a symbol of resistance from within.” This is another area in which the book succeeds. Here is a book set in 1930s Portugal when fascism was predominant in Europe and the Spanish Civil War was raging yet is viewed as speaking to issues decades later. In fact, as allegory, Pereira Maintains will undoubtedly remain relevant, which perhaps suggests why it is reappearing in hardcover.
Equally impressive is Tabucchi’s crisp and concise writing. Even though Pereira also ponders the Catholic ideas of the soul and resurrection and the role of literature in society, Pereira Maintains is less than 200 pages. Few books can remain quite so readable while exploring — and allowing the reader to explore — such a variety of issues as they confront a near everyman. To say that Pereira Maintains excels at more than one thing is a serious understatement. In fact, it surpasses almost any test of first-class literature.
History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.
Antonia Tabucchi , Pereira Maintains
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The Urgent Matter of Books (“You must stop listening to the contemporary double-speak discourse and the dominant modes of entertainment production. You must silence the clicker, take a facehooker break, and put down that latte.”) (via)
- The Last Two Veterans of WWI (“What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing???”) NOTE: Two days after this story was posted, one of the two died.
Osama bin Linkage
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.
William Golding
Most of the public attention surrounding last night’s City Council meeting was on the ongoing and longstanding debate over an events center. Yet item 29 of 31 on the agenda, a relatively innocuous item, was of more personal interest.
Just more than two hours into the meeting, the Council unanimously approved a resolution “advising and giving consent” to the appointment or reappointment of 18 people to various city boards and commission. I was at the bottom of page 1, having been appointed by the Mayor to the Siouxland Libraries Board of Trustees. I will be filling the term of someone leaving the board but am slated to serve until May 2013. Although my appointment doesn’t really become official until 20 days after the resolution has been published in the newspaper of record, I will attend next week’s board meeting, although as a member of the public.
Library boards aren’t — or at least shouldn’t be — political and I think my appointment speaks to that. I submitted an application when I saw there was a vacancy. It’s my understanding the current board reviewed the applicants and submitted a few names to the Mayor. I may have met the Mayor once or twice while he was in the private sector. I didn’t contribute to his (or anyone’s) mayoral campaign. In fact, I don’t even recall who I voted for in the general municipal election a year ago.
I am excited about the opportunity. Libraries face new challenges given that “the book is dying” and there’s increased pressure on public budgets at a time when the library is a lifeline for many without access to the resources it can provide. In addition, design work is supposedly underway for a new branch library in the area of town in which I live. I, of course, want to see that through to fruition. At bottom, though, it’s a very small bit of recompense for everything libraries gave and give me.
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
Toni Morrison, 1997
But for book awards this month, I would actually have no books on hold at the local library. At the end of April, though, I added one so my streak continues. None of the other books making this month’s list are currently available so it means actually shelling out cash for a book or two (we’ll ignore the 15 that returned with me from my Twin Cities road trip earlier in April). Here’s what hit my radar during the month:
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan — Lots of hype doesn’t attract me to books usually. But when a novel wins the National Book Critics Circle award, the Pulitzer Prize, the LA Times book award and the Tournament of Books in the course of six weeks I figure I am left with little choice. Thus, it is my library hold book.
Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, Jonathan Kay — An online article on the book and my own fascination with conspiracy theorists has this on my list. I find this additionally intriguing because the author is a Canadian journalist, not an American.
Embassytown, China Miéville — Miéville is one of my favorite contemporary science fiction authors so this one is a no-brainer.
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, Ellen Willis — To be honest, Willis’s name doesn’t jump out — or even ring a bell — when I think about rock music critics in the ’60s and ’70s. Praise for her work accompanying this book and the fact it focuses on the music of my formative years was enough to put it on the list.
Report Card:
Year to Date (January-April 2011)
- Total Bibliolust books: 21
- Number read: 13 (61.9%)
- Started but did not finish: 3 (14.3%)
Cumulative (September 2008-April 2011)
- Total Bibliolust books: 171
- Number read: 129 (75.4%)
- Started but did not finish: 12 (7%)
Here is all I ask of a book — give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
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